Campaigns seek measure of Internet success

Presidential candidates spend serious amounts of energy trying to get their message directly to voters online. Some of the more newsworthy efforts have focused on campaign-created MySpace, Facebook, Meetup and YouTube pages — and so far, the payoff has been difficult to measure.

Mindy Finn, director of e-strategy for Republican candidate Mitt Romney, was an online strategist for Bush-Cheney in 2004. Back then, she said, campaigns primarily judged their online success by measuring traffic to the candidate site and the campaign blog.

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Peter Daou, who worked online strategy for Democratic candidate and Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004 and is now the online coordinator for New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential run, agreed. “We barely had blogs,” he said of the Kerry campaign.

But the online world today is nothing like it was in its infancy. “Now, in 2007, sites like Compete are not just serving up what specific traffic is going to your website but your reach across the Web,” Finn said.

That reach extends across the Web in mysterious and often inscrutable ways. “Online politics is growing at a dramatic pace, so this is relatively new for everyone,” said Daou. “There are a variety of metrics that are easy to understand: There’s total dollars for fundraising, there’s number of signatures for petitions, number of volunteers for organizing. But the overall cumulative effect of all this online activity, in some ways, remains to be determined.”

To get some small read on that online activity, Compete.com, a company founded in 2000 that measures and analyzes Web traffic, studied the habits of hundreds of thousands of online political readers. The nonpartisan, for-profit company uses what’s called a “panel” of roughly 2 million Internet users who have agreed to allow their Web behavior to be tracked and analyzed for research purposes. (Other well-regarded companies that measure Web traffic also use a panel-based tracking system, including Nielsen, comScore and Hitwise.)

The study, performed for Politico, is simply a snapshot of online activity; it followed only those readers projected to have visited an official candidate website at least once in September.

But the results reveal interesting online habits among the politically attuned. A significant number get their news from mainstream media versus political blogs. YouTube, meanwhile, is one of the most reliable ways for candidates to communicate directly to voters. But the candidates’ official Meetup, Facebook and MySpace pages appear less effective at that.

Despite their seemingly small numbers, these social networking sites still offer candidates big potential audiences. “There are roughly 80 different Facebook groups” dedicated to Romney, said his online communications director, Stephen Smith. “They have dozens or hundreds or tens of thousands of members alone. They’re not even necessarily touching [former Massachusetts] Gov. Romney’s official Facebook page.”

Readers like social networking websites in general. Half of those tracked by Compete visited MySpace in September, and 54 percent visited YouTube. Nearly two-thirds went to Wikipedia, a quarter logged on to Facebook and 7 percent visited Meetup.

But candidates’ specific pages on social networking sites were considerably less popular. Meetup, the darling of the 2004 election cycle, barely registers with any candidate other than Internet phenom Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). Overall, only 1 percent of readers who visited an official campaign website last month also visited a candidate’s Meetup page. Two percent checked out the candidates’ MySpace pages, and 1 percent hit his or her Facebook page.

YouTube is in a different league, with 16 percent of its readers visiting candidate-specific pages. That traffic is reflected on the pages themselves. Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, for example, has more than 11,000 subscribers to his YouTube page, which has been viewed more than 11 million times. Fifteen percent of people who went to his official campaign site also went to his YouTube page, compared to 9 percent for Clinton. (Daou noted that the campaign tries to drive video traffic primarily to its own website, before its YouTube page — citing the widely viewed “Sopranos” spoof that generated a million views.)